AES: Mackie Up the Ante With New Onyx 1200F

30 plus channels of IO with classy preamps 11/10/05

A classy box of Onyx

Mackies Onyx Mic pres have been getting good press since they first arrived in the Onyx desktop consoles. Indeed having some first-hand experience of them myself in the form of a 16 channel Onyx with FireWire card installed, I can say that they really do sound pretty darned good. So the availability of another unit from the Mackie campo can only be good news.
The said unit is the new Onyx 1200F a 30 input, 34 output 24-bit/192kHz ready FireWire audio/MIDI interface. You get 12 of the aforementioned Onyx preamps, plus a DSP based, extremely low latency assignable routing and discrete mix engine for up to four headphone mixes, two stereo control room outs.This DSP functionality also allows you to patch any hardware input, or mix any combination of hardware inputs, to any hardware output.
The front panel has monitor level controls, four headphone outputs with level controls, two instrument inputs, and 4-segment metering for the mic/line input channels.
The Onyx 1200F has an appealing rear end too with 12 combo mic/line inputs, balanced TRS sends and returns for the first two mic inputs, eight balanced line outputs, dual stereo control room outputs, Word Clock I/O, 2 x 2 MIDI I/O, dual ADAT I/O, SPDIF I/O, AES/EBU I/O, and two FireWire ports.
Mackie are keen for the 1200F to be an "out of the box solution", so are shipping it with their own Tracktion 2 DAW software and the Mackie Final Mix CD mastering toolkit.
AvailabilityEarly 2006. Suggested retail price of $1,999.00.